


A Foolish Thought To Which We'll Return

by LaShaRa



Series: Amegakure Orphans [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Akatsuki - Freeform, Ame Orphans, Amegakure, Fluff, Good Akatsuki (Naruto), Konan deserved better, Multi, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-06
Updated: 2020-01-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:41:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22150489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaShaRa/pseuds/LaShaRa
Summary: Konan believes with everything she has in Yahiko’s vision for a better world. She will fight to the end at his side, with Nagato beside her, with their brothers around them, and she’s prepared to die there too. They’re shinobi, even as outcasts, and shinobi are as celebrated for their deaths as they are for their lives. She’s imagined Yahiko’s peaceful world more times than she can count over the years, but she’s always known there’s a chance none of them might be around to see it. She hasn't thought about what it might mean for them, if they made it. For just the three of them.
Relationships: Konan & Nagato | Pain, Konan & Nagato | Pain & Yahiko, Konan & Pain & Yahiko, Konan/Yahiko, Konan/Yahiko (Naruto)
Series: Amegakure Orphans [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1823980
Kudos: 16





	A Foolish Thought To Which We'll Return

“Do you ever think about it?”

Yahiko’s voice is unusually quiet, barely audible over the drumming roar of rain on sheet metal roofs. Konan turns towards him, one eyebrow raised, but he’s not looking at her. He’s watching a group of genin playing two storeys below, on the steps of the ramshackle building that currently serves as Amegakure’s jounin barracks. Some of the children look familiar. Even as they watch, the small russet-haired girl who’d boldy introduced herself to Yahiko as “ _ Hoshiko, future shinobi of Amegakure!”,  _ succeeds in producing a fistful of fire, which she immediately hurls into a waiting barrel of rubbish. Cheers erupt, and within seconds the genin are huddling together, holding an impressive variety of food scraps to the flames. Konan snorts with laughter despite herself, smiling as Hoshiko wedges a slice of pineapple and a fish fin between two smouldering bread crusts and then stuffs the entire bizarre construction in her mouth. It’s been a while since she thought of herself as an Ame orphan, but these kids are still the toughest she’s ever known. 

Yahiko clears his throat, and she realizes that she hasn’t answered his question. Then again, she doesn’t quite understand the question. “Think about what?” she clarifies, turning back to him. There’s an expression on his face that she doesn’t recognize, which in itself concerns her slightly. She’s known him for more than half her life. She thought she knew all his expressions. 

Now, he takes his time to respond, takes a breath, and still doesn’t look at her. Konan is about to take a step towards him when he says, “Children.” It sounds like it costs him. His eyes are pained, still fixed on the street even as the rain gathers in force and two jounin emerge from the barracks, herding the genin into the building. It’s not an easy task, given their reluctance to abandon the hard-won cooking equipment; Hoshiko is the last to leave the street, gnawing determinedly at a fish head. The door to the barracks slams shut.  __

“I think about children,” Konan says automatically, not really considering it. Half her brain is struggling with what she’s just seen - there are a multitude of reasons for genin being banned from entering the jounin barracks, but those kids are two thunderstorms away from contracting pneumonia. The other half of her brain is trying to work out why Yahiko suddenly looks so devastated. Until two minutes ago, she’d though they’d been having what passes for a good day, for them. An unannounced visit to the village they still call home, just the three of them, having left Kyusuke and Daibetsu behind to supervise the rest of the fledgeling Akatsuki. She and Yahiko have flitted around the village in full view as if they were beloved dignitaries, dropping in and out of lodgings to drink sake with citizens and shinobi who would once have kicked them off their doorsteps but are now only too eager to be seen showing support. Nagato had melted into the dripping shadows as soon as they arrived, off to amass the kind of intel that only lived there, a task in which he is particularly skilled. They’d arranged to meet at sunset to compare notes and decide how much longer they could afford to stay. 

Konan’s still too wary to enjoy talking to people, especially civilians, but she enjoys watching Yahiko work, the way he can charm, placate or threaten absolutely anyone as the need arises. He doesn’t like the game any more than she does, but he was born to play it. She’d thought he’d been glad when Hoshiko stopped him in the street, thought he’d secretly enjoyed taking a few minutes to spar with the fierce child to the delight of her genin yearmates. “We were just with the children,” she points out, on the heels of this memory. “Half of what we’re doing here is because of the children.”

Yahiko makes a frustrated sound and scrubs his hand over his head. His hair remains brightly, perfectly spiked, and Konan thinks of Nagato’s grumbling amazement at how Yahiko’s theatrics never seem to affect his look, whereas the two of them can’t leave the safehouse without needing to mend their clothes after.  _ Not the time,  _ she tells herself, even as Yahiko turns and walks deeper into the shade of the skeletal flat at which they’ve stopped. “Not them - at least, not right now,” he says. He arrives at another window and stares out. “I meant...children of our own.”

Konan stands very still, staring at the back of his robes. She thinks about a morning two months ago, sitting sleepily at one of the mess tables in the safehouse, her hands warm around the chipped mug of tea that Nagato had just passed her. Yahiko had walked in, still in his coat, shaking rain from his perfect hair and calling greetings to the others. She’d half-turned in her seat, expecting to see his bright grin, hear his exuberant _ohayo gozaimasu!_ and whatever fondly mocking greeting he’d come up with for Nagato, and instead he’d leaned down and kissed her, soft and slow and sweet like few things have been in their lives. She’d kissed him back reflexively, because it was _him_ and how could she not, and afterwards he’d straightened up and smiled and continued on to where Nagato was gazing into the rice pot, grabbing him in a headlock and mussing up his hair. Konan had continued to sit at the table, clutching her mug until the tin handled creaked and her heart hammered and hammered, shock and confusion and a tiny, curling flame of hope unfurling from everywhere in her body. 

She feels like that now, standing here staring at the back of Yahiko’s head as he gazes out over the village. They haven’t talked about this fragile, impossible thing between them, each day filled with enough activity to prevent such conversations from happening. They’ve completed mission after mission all over the country and beyond, they’ve made multiple recruiting trips, they’ve added another wing to the safehouse. There’s always more to be done.

They’ve kissed exactly twice more. Once on the back terrace, in the searing silent three o’ clock cold, as she passed him heading out for the dawn patrol. Once at the end of their mission to Yukigakure, when she’d been about to leave their cave shelter to gather firewood. Two fleeting, quiet kisses that nevertheless made her warm the way she seldom is, that diverted her thoughts from their usual steady flow. Nothing else has changed between them - there are none of those tender looks and lingering touches that were so common in Jiraiya’s beloved books. Nagato circles them both, saying little, always keeping his distance, hiding worlds of expression behind his eyes.

She has never dared to hope for anything more. The things she has are already impossible. Instead of starving to death in the rain at the age of five or six, she’d found two precious, impossible people, been trained and taught and mentored by one of the famed Sannin of Konoha, begun to fight back against the evil and the darkness that overshadowed her world, and now, gathered a ragtag band of allies and perhaps even friends who were willing to fight with her. She’d lived to grow up. She’d lived to be happy again. 

She believes with everything she has in Yahiko’s vision for a better world. She will fight to the end at his side, with Nagato beside her, with their brothers around them, and she’s prepared to die there too. They’re shinobi, even as outcasts, and shinobi are as celebrated for their deaths as they are for their lives. She’s imagined Yahiko’s peaceful world more times than she can count over the years, but she’s always known there’s a chance none of them might be around to see it. She hasn't thought about what it might mean for _them,_ if they made it. For just the three of them.

She’s been silent for too long and Yahiko’s shoulders slump, so imperceptibly that only she or Nagato would notice. “It’s all right, Konan,” he says, voice just a shade too steady. “It was just a foolish thought. Forgive me. I won’t speak of it again.”

Her hammering heart twinges painfully, but before she can say anything else, Yahiko has leaned forward and thrust his hand out of the window, palm upturned into the storm that has not stopped for decades. Rain immediately sluices into it, filling it in seconds, and Yahiko brings his hand back inside and up to his face. He drinks. He drinks the gritty, gassy, cloudy rainwater of Amegakure that even the orphan kids know to boil first and somewhere Nagato just experienced a violent full-body shudder in the middle of interrogating a sources, but Yahiko drinks it and he looks over his shoulder at Konan and he  _ grins _ , all sharp teeth and roguish eyes, because he knows exactly what she just thought. 

And she sees it. For one tiny, brilliant moment, she sees it. She sees  _ them.  _ A little boy with shaggy violet hair and wild amber eyes, raising the seven kinds of hell that Yahiko would absolutely love and deserve in any child of his. A tall girl with a sunburst mane and cool laughing eyes, who could match her jutsu for jutsu, rose for rose. Sunny love and trust without tears and quiet, brilliant mockery, handed down from Nagato, because where else would he through it all be but beside them? They are hazy at the edges and far in a future at which they might never arrive, because the three of them are barely out of childhood and they have a world to reshape. But for a moment, she can see the best of them, fragile and strong and incredible, theirs to raise and protect and set free in a new world, and it takes her breath away.

“It is a foolish thought for this moment,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean we should never speak of it again.”

Yahiko’s eyes widen, surprised and questioning and heartrendingly hopeful, and Konan lets herself smile at him, unreserved and bright. “They will be so strong,” she whispers. “They will be so loved.”

“Konan,” breathes Yahiko, and then Nagato is swinging himself through the window behind them, landing with a flurry of rain-soaked robes on the wooden floor and a quiet  _ tadaima _ . They both turn to look at him and he looks back, eyes glimmering curiously through his drenched fringe. “Konan. Yahiko. Am I interrupting?” 

Yahiko colours, and Nagato’s mouth quirks; he twitches in the direction of the window. Before she can think too much about it, Konan crosses over to him. “ _ Okaeri,  _ Nagato,” she says, rising on her toes and pressing her lips to his forehead. His skin is cooler than hers or Yahiko’s and when she pulls back he stares first at her and then at Yahiko with a quietly stunned expression which they seldom have cause to see. “I seem to have missed something,” he says, careful. Yahiko is motionless behind them.

Konan laughs. Her heart hammers, but she feels lighter than she has in two months. “We were just discussing the future,” she explains.

“Is that so?” says Nagato. The corners of his mouth are flickering. “And which future is that?”

She looks across the room to Yahiko and the answer is clear on his face, in the intensity of the amber eyes that trace their two forms. “Ours,” she says simply, and the rain thunders down with renewed vigour, sending a gust of wind spiralling in through the window, wild and charged and sweet.

“In that case,” begins Yahiko. A soft, brilliant light is settling over his features and Konan loves him, loves them both so much that she has to restrain herself from filling the air with blossoms, exuberant as fireworks as he continues, “We have some work to do.” 

They walk to the window together. Outside, only slivers and fragments of Amegakure are visible through the silver sheet of rain, made into an abstract masterpiece by the same thing that overshadows it. In this moment, Konan doesn’t grieve. She is flanked by the two people most precious to her, full of warmth and foolish hope, and in this moment, she can see another world through the rain. Amber eyes and starburst hair and quiet quirking smiles. As they step onto the windowsill, Nagato murmurs, “Don’t drink the rain, Yahiko,” and then they’re all laughing, for one bright, bizarre moment, and they take the jump together. 

**Author's Note:**

> I will not bow to canon. I will not. They deserved better. Even by my standards this fic is FLUFFY but oh well. If anyone deserves a little more fluff, its these three.
> 
> Also, go check out @makabrotka on Instagram - loving the Ame Orphans feels lonely sometimes, but their fanart and headcanons remind me why it's worth it!


End file.
